I request you to have patience if you choose to read this open letter. I have been following several discussions across campuses regarding the use of language and appropriateness of language with animated interest. This conversation follows my own interest in the relation between languages and societies, and about allowing the “grotesque” in languages and cultures. I hope I am not read as a “holier-than-thou” preacher or as a new advocate of a new censorship through this article. The use of slang and ‘cuss’ words in colleges is a part of the new found independence that as students we all treasure. We have the “IIT Lingo” that is a set of words and abbreviations that are unique to each IIT. They are interesting identity markers, but there is something that still lurks between the “official” and the “unofficial”. There are certain words and statements which are “allowed” and in fact encouraged in hostel premises, but we tend to leave those words and terms in hostels and in our individual chat rooms. This article emerges from anguish and from a concern for a society that we all intend to contribute to in our best possible capacity.

A couple of days ago I was about to start some discussions in my class on the white-board, and the moment I turned around to face the white-board, I encountered this statement clearly etched out: “Maths is Fucking Awesome”. I have been coming across the use of explicit in many other social and individual contexts as well. They seem to have defined the “freedom” and “autonomy” of students. While I deeply admire and respect the sentiments of freedom of speech, of anonymity, and of creative dissent, I could not resist getting into an animated conversation with my class for a while regarding the appropriateness of ‘cuss’ words and if it is alright to be using these words as a part of public display of our emotions. Why not? That is also a part of language and a way of expressing our anger and frustration. Why not? It makes us sound bold and cool. Why not? After all, our movies Delhi Belly, No One Killed Jessica, Mardaani… all use words that are “fucking” awesome. While using the word “fucking” in this article (believe me I am doing this for the first time in any article I have written so far), I felt my adrenaline rush, it gave me a high as it perhaps does for other users. In fact, I have been wondering, does that make me sound “cool” and “sexy” as a Professor? Maybe to some extent or maybe not. This point reminds me of a conversation I had with a scholar years ago. The scholar insisted that in order to be called an “intellectual” you “should” be a social drinker. My rebuttal was “if I have to take to drinking as a personal choice, I might go for it but if I “have” to get a licence to be called an intellectual only through drinking, I rather refrain from being branded as an intellectual”. Explicit language is one such intoxication. The more we use them, the more we want to use these words in both written and spoken forms. We never know at what point of time, the words that sounded “cool” during college days, might brand us as “abusers” in the long run, when we use the same words against our wife/husband, children, friends, or colleagues. At that point of time, we might regret the same words that once made us feel proud about ourselves and gave us a high.

As someone who teaches Literature and at times Language to students, this overwhelming use of explicit in college corridors, classrooms, television shows, sounds plain awkward to my ears. Maybe I come from an “old” school of thought, with an idea that if I have to kill someone, I have to know my language well and I have to write better so that my words themselves can kill. I do not subscribe to the view of language reaching the extent of profanity, and the formal reducing itself to the level of ludicrous without achieving any purpose. At the risk of sounding too pedantic or exhibiting my knowledge, I beg to cite a few pieces of writing. In conventional British literature studies, there is an age called the “Age of Satire”, starts late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, led by people like John Dryden and Alexander Pope, with biting satirical pieces like “Absalom Achitophel” and “Rape of the Lock” that satirized the functioning of the British monarchy and other socio-cultural aspects of their time. However, there is not a single “fuck” or “f***” (whatever form you may chose) word in there. They shook the foundations of the British monarchy with just one or two long poetic pieces. Mahatma Gandhi’s writings can be looked at as pieces of high quality satire; Hind Swaraj shakes the foundation of the Empire in India. Gandhi can be “fucking awesome” or he can be “simply brilliant”. The choice of words and expressions is ours, but the reception of the reader or the listener is their own. Take another example of the poet named P. B. Shelly who was expelled from Oxford because of a 13 page pamphlet “Necessity of Atheism”. Legends say, Shelly scared “the s***” out of Oxford (or may we say “Shelly antagonised Oxford in an unprecedented example of satire”?), without using even one explicit, such that he had to be expelled from college. There is a thin line of demarcation between trivializing and critiquing, and sadly, I am getting the vibe of an abject trivializing through the use of explicit, than actually developing an “original” critique. We are learning to acquire a few terms, a few theories, a few linguistic and cultural insights in bits and pieces, and instead of getting intrigued by the need for more, we land up being satiated by these crumbs and use them to our own sweet purposes. Why not do that? Our society needs par-blind intellectuals who can see only one side of the moon, so that generation after generation we live with similar intellectual and spiritual parasitic tendencies, depending on other parts of the world to provide us nourishment instead of developing our own path.

I have been a regular on social network sites (use it also for academic purposes), and when I perch on one or the other “that-which-shall-not-be-named” site, I enjoy reading the conversation against courses, “profs”, “admin” and so on. In fact, I feel elated that students can actually raise their voice in a fearless, uncensored manner and can actually help in changing systems. However, of late when I read the comments on some of these sites, they sound downright ‘popcorn-goonish’ to me. Social sites are places where our actions are observed by people who might “covet” for the place and the time that we are living in. Responsible networking is also a part of social ethics and sadly when I perch on certain pages, I feel quashed to pulp, not by the brilliance, but by the abjection of language. In the medieval times in European theory, we studied a beautiful phenomenon called the “grotesque”. However, the “grotesque” was allowed only in the carnival square not in the “officialdom” of even the medieval world.

Indians have been a victim of linguistic imperialism for centuries, in the nineteenth and twentieth century by British-English and in the twenty-first century by Americanization of English language. As someone who observes these phenomena at an academic level, I feel helpless as a mute spectator watching the changes of our times and their times.

If I have taught any of my classes at any point in time, the use of cuss words and explicit language as a way of sounding “cool”, kindly accept my public apology.

(This article is slated to be published by the alumni magazine of IIT Bombay in one of its forthcoming issues)

As someone who has been on both sides of the table, there are a few interesting expectations from literary studies that I have encountered as a student and as a teacher in the journey so far.

There are some people who expect us to have read all possible texts (novels and poems) that have been classified under ‘literary’ studies; to recite poems verbatim, to quote exact words, to define ‘story’, ‘plot’, ‘character’, as if literature is all about rote learning. As I look back, I realize I haven’t read even half of those ‘classic’ texts. I do not remember my own poems, forget memorizing the poems of Keats or Shelly or Whitman. Seniors from engineering disciplines at IIT tested me by asking if I had read a certain ‘remote’ ‘less-known’ Kant, Wittgenstein, Tagore, Dickens, Hardy. They could actually cite the exact page numbers. I usually had a puzzled look as a response. I have not been an avid reader, just been a focused reader.

There are another set of people who expect that students of literature can write love-letters and are ‘romantic’ by default. As I reflect back, I feel love and romance was not my profession, literature was. I perceived an “ideal” world that came alive only in my imagination and only through the characters in the texts that I read. I have written just one love-letter in life and that was during a love-letter writing competition of PG cult; but never won the prize. 🙂 I realized that there were far more intense love-letter writers from other disciplines than I could ever be.

There are a third set of people who expect us to be experts in CV analysis or to be great editors. As I read through some of my own writings, I realize how much I needed a CV analyst and a soft-skills trainer to train me in the art of marketing my work. So, what do students of literature actually do? If there are better ‘thinkers’, ‘writers’, ‘analysts’, ‘reviewers’, ‘soft-skills’ trainers or even ‘lovers’ than us, what have we been doing so far? A little something of everything or ‘much ado about nothing’? Living under borrowed titles? Or living as parasites/adjuncts in a robust tree of an institution? I hope the profession of literary experts is not getting limited to being bad critics or worse reviewers? I hope we are not an endangered profession like the clock-keepers or ‘Ghadi-babus’ of the 19th century, who dwindled away with the turn of the century after the invention of automatic clocks?

Well, I am in quest for the answers myself. Help me out, if you can.

Until then…. This piece of writing is in the ‘confessional’ literary vein.

This week has been a very hectic week with a strange combo of art, exams, presentations, interviews, shifting, dust, morning blues, concerts,papers, rejections, Mushaiyaras (don’t look aghast — I was not the one reciting. Just a mute listener and spectator), semester-end blues — in short LIFE itself! You must have heard the quote, “life is what happens to you when you are busy with other things”. I was in fact trying to figure out which version of life am I leading through this happening journey, almost like Microsoft Service Pack versions!

I could not even find the time to draft a complete article for Iris this week. But a commitment is a commitment: aur jab main kuchh commit karti hoon toh khud ki bhi nahin sunti 🙂 . On a serious note, came across an old hand-written scribble of my version of ‘life’, written once upon a time. May not actually agree to the lines today. I am too prosaic these days to accept the challenge of ‘thinking’ poetry. Moreover, am not sure if I have the same innocence that my poetry had once kind of promised in its fragrant closures.

However, whatever…. Here is my version of life for you…written once upon a time in the Garden of Eden 🙂

A handful of friends who are concerned about our well-being once in a while call us up or drop in the chat and ask, “what’s up?” . I have a rehearsed answer, “you know what, I am writing two major papers, reading a book on cave history, preparing my lecture notes….” and the list continues until they get bored, yawn and decide to say a ‘bye’. What they know I mean is ‘I am trying to do [something] when I am doing nothing….” 🙂 Some of them are kind enough to point out, “Oh yes, we actually see you online most of the times on FB or Gmail” or else “Yeah, you have no time but still you blog quite often” — in crude Mumbaiya language — you are doing lukkha. Sometimes blogging is seen as a crime, waste of time and talent.

As a student of literature, I was given dollops of British literature at the beginning of my career. The smell of coffee-houses, charm of the British countryside, and the slow journey of classic novels. Of the Shakespeares and Miltons, of the Lawrences and Hardys, my pick always used to be romantic poetry or else essays — ‘personal essays’, precisely. I had a dream of writing like Charles Lamb or J.B.Priestly in the genre of essays. However, as the genre itself, my own creativity went into a decadent phase. Yet, I believe every form has its ups and downs and the genre of essays and ‘personal essays’ would also one day see the light of the day — my estimate and hope, being blogs.

There is a favourite read out of all these picks, J.B.Priestley “On Doing Nothing” 😉 . As a young student, I had taken that essay so seriously that always felt a pride when people asked me questions and I would arrogantly reply, “I am doing nothing”. The joy of reading that particular essay cannot be described in words. I really used to imagine lying on the grass looking at the Orion in the night sky, feeling the dew on the skin, and simply…doing nothing. What a delight it was reading these lines, your deep-secret desires, being narrated by an iconic author:

You have spent at least several days rushing from one to the other, explaining everywhere how desperately busy you are, with one eighteen-hour day after another, secretaries fainting, wife telephoning to the doctor about you; no time to eat properly, just living on brandy and mysterious blue capsules. Then, slap in the middle of all this hullabaloo, pack it up for a day or two, allowing each gang to conclude you are toiling for one of the other gangs, and do nothing, absolutely nothing… yawn and stretch…; glance at newspapers, dip into light literature, and gossip; but no more. No gardening, sharp walks, correspondence, nor even jobs about the house. Get as close to doing nothing as it is possible for a Western Aryan or whoever we are. Give an occasional thought, for spice and devilment, to the worrying colleagues. Refuse to answer the telephone—too busy. It is a dirty trick—but delicious. — (J.B.Priestley, “On Doing Nothing”, in Delights, Ch-57)

Some of the expressions might appear offensive to my readers because of its gender content and racial tones (Aryan is not a happy expression post-Hitler). However, I would insist that Priestley was one such author who brought smiles on the faces of his readers. Writing humour in a post 2nd World War phase must have been tough….

Cut to the present.

Perhaps, those were the times when one could think about ‘doing nothing’ and survive. In my undergraduate days when computers, laptops, Internet, social-networking were not the very ‘in’ things in Odisha, and when we lived on the sixth floor of the library amidst greying books, and dust-covered pages, “Doing Nothing”, Priestley style was imaginable. Landline phones were under parental control and no friends dared to call unless under the pretext of ‘home-work’ or ‘examination discussion’ . You could go completely ‘underground’ for days and months and re-emerge freshened up from whatever you were doing/ not doing. Meeting friends after a vacation would be like a mini college-fair and everything had an exaggerated gloss of a ‘filmy’ meeting after a lonnnggg separation.

With communication boom and with my personal addiction to communication and ‘need’ for communicating, ‘doing nothing’ seems almost like a dream and being ‘out of touch’ another impossibility. Always the appearance is that of ‘doing something’.

As students at IIT, if we appeared silent or offline for half-a-day, friends would call back inquiring if we are alright. In fact we had a small group joke that if we remain out of contact for half-a-day, either we have done break-through research or else we are pining over something/someone or else we are downloading some song/movie.

Being ‘on-line’ especially was a boon for ‘singles’. A prolonged ‘off-line’ status usually was taken as a sign of someone being ‘engaged’. Social networking used to be a succour for all the kindred souls devoid of human company (non-literary: the addas for singles ) People have different ways of ‘doing things’, and social-networking statuses are usually indicative of these ‘doings’ and ‘not-doings’.

Even post-student days, the urge to be ‘doing something’ is so strongly addictive that it is difficult to keep it away and to give time to yourself and observe things around you. This evening as I was returning home after office, for the first time in the past many months I observed that there is a camel having a pretty little smile tied outside the campus premises. For the first time I saw that there are some flowers by the campus by-lanes. I was observing the setting sun looking a greyish-yellow amidst the layers of evening dust, making me think of many people, so many friends, relatives and well-wishers who are with me and some who have left me.

The mind is so preoccupied with thoughts of work and otherwise that subtle things of life are missed.

The plans from now to forever, go on so deeply, that perceiving powers lower and so do imagination, creativity — because we are always doing something, hardly giving our selves the chance to be fallow.This summer my mother pointed out to me this restlessness. She said ‘either I see you glued to the Internet or to some book. When you leave one of these you grab the other…why not give yourself some break and just do nothing’ .

A dormant volcano when bursts is much more hazardous than the active ones because it has not been active for a certain phase. Creativity or scholarship or even yourself also have the capacity of that dormant volcano. However, the difference should be that instead of wrecking havoc by doing things that destroy us and people around us, can we do something positive by ‘doing nothing’? I must be sounding preachy and I am sure you will sing this after reading the article:

The one you warned me all about
The one you said I could do without
We’re in an awful mess, and I don’t mean maybe – please
Papa don’t preach, I’m in trouble deep
Papa don’t preach, I’ve been losing sleep —

( “Papa Don’t Preach” )

(This post comes earlier than my weekend posts because of some appointments tomorrow)

In the first week of a long vacation, Iris is back with her weekend post. The laptop is running on battery, Internet connectivity is at its least possible speed. At the moment, there seems to be no trace of electricity, with thunder storms greeting me to the charms of the east. The shadow of bougainvilleas, calmness of the streets, smell of damp earth, and the extreme quietness of the place leads me to turn poetic or philosophical. The hulla of my own world, chaos of my thoughts, and the calmness of this place are so deeply contradicting one another.

It is going to be an erratic one month. Not sure how often will I be able to get in touch with my readers through this month.

Since the mood is philosophical, thought about sharing some of my musings on the ‘unspoken’. What do you think of the unspoken? Recently, a student wrote a lovely line to me: “ whatever we speak, there is still some beauty in the unspoken”. I have been thinking about the unspoken aspects since.

Actually, it is true – we are so literally understood by what we say that what is left unsaid is something that either no one cares to interpret or else we are apprehensive to interpret. A person is usually adjudged by the personality that she/ he projects to the external world through what she/ he says or does – but what remains within is something that the world hardly tries to penetrate. Who has the time or patience? If you have seen the movie Mera Naam Joker you might understand my implication. In that movie, the character of the protagonist (Raj Kapoor) is taken literally, as a ‘joker’, a ‘clown’ and his love which perhaps was more serious than the love of all the other male characters in the movie, is interpreted as a comedy by the ladies. His story remains incomplete because he is seen as a frivolous character, with hardly any show of substance or rationality. The joker’s deep philosophy on the nature of life and love as an experience is misinterpreted as ‘non-seriousness’ and the rest of his actual feelings remain unspoken till his death.

The unsaid has its root in human life and human personality. What we read as ‘history’ is the said aspects of human civilization, but what we take as rumour might be a part of the unspoken aspects of human histories that somehow were swept under the carpet of time. I can recollect such an aspect from the memory of a play that I had once seen during my first year at Performing Arts Festival (PAF) at IIT. The story was about the unspoken aspect of Shahjehan and Mumtaz Mahal’s love story culminating in the Taj Mahal. In that particular PAF play, they had shown that apparently there is a conspiracy theory that the Taj was built with Mumtaz being forced to die in order to give her name to the monument, and to make a great love-story out of her death. I don’t know what were the sources for that play, but they had actually beautifully depicted the unspoken aspects of histories that do not get written in any text-book.

Love-stories and mystery thrillers particularly rest on the trope of the unspoken. They invite you to keep questioning on ‘really?’, ‘what happened next?’ and other such aspects. Real life love stories are heavily dependent on the unspoken. What is said is just a part of the entire gamut of things that remain unsaid. I have seen friends and people whom I know who are in love, keep harping the point that ‘oh there is so much to know about her/him’, there is so much to talk about. Possibly, it is that pull of the unspoken because of which people spend hours over phone (I am against such hour long conversations in principle 🙂 ), trying to know more about the other.

Perhaps, this burden of the unspoken also forms the core reason behind divorces, and break-ups. In the entire lot that has been said, there also remain a lot that goes unsaid – because of communication gaps. How often you think of friends, family, or colleagues who have distanced themselves from you because of the unsaid words that cluttered up between you and them? Have you had a friend or a person whom you really loved a lot but with whom you haven’t spoken for months or years? It is when the unspoken piles up beyond proportion that communication failure occurs. You wish to get in touch or speak to this person for months and years on, but then the weight of words and the weight of that which remains unsaid are so high that finally the necessity of communicating get destroyed. Relationships are so fragile that a few words have the power of destroying or building them beyond imagination.

Not only in love, in professional life too the unspoken has so much of a presence that spoken words get completely interpreted, re-interpreted, and mis-interpreted along the lines of the unspoken. Somewhere you are able to defend the unspoken and at some places, spoken words go defenseless.

The purpose of this brief post was to highlight the necessity of not only the unsaid, but also that which is said. We need sometimes to speak-up our minds, to clear up miscommunication, to talk, and get in touch with people who are important in our lives. Yes, some aspects are better left unsaid, but many more need words and courage. What I feel unfortunate in case of spoken words are, when the character of people, their integrity, their commitment, their dedication towards relationships and life are adjudged along what they speak and what they do not. A joker, or a clown doesn’t necessarily mean to be a joker – it’s just the surface. People choose friends or partners as per their appearances or their outward seriousness of disposition – who assesses the magnitude of what the person is ‘not’ displaying?

With that, I concede that some weeks of Iris may remain unspoken….. Hope to meet you all sometime soon, no idea when exactly, depends on my mood and time. Till then, humming this favourite number of Gulzar saab from the movie Thodi si Bewafai which seem to echo my thoughts on the unspoken:

Unhen yeh zidd ki hum bulaate,

Hamen yeh umeed ke woh pukaare

Hain naam hothon pe ab bhi lekin,

Awwaz mein pad gayi daraare…

Hazaar rahen mudke dekhi,

Kahin se koi sada na aayi..

Badi wafa se nibhayi tumne,

Hamari thodi si bewafaii…

(Rough transl.: They were obstinate to wait for my call, and I had the hope that they will call me first. The names still linger on our lips, but the wall of voices within have now cracked….Thousands of miles I turned back to see if you would call me once, but there has been not a single call through these miles…How faithfully have you abided by my slight unfaithfulness)

Apologies for being away from the blogosphere for nearly a month. You can say the muse has been a bit sleepy or maybe I have been lazy. But, there is one aspect of life that has been haunting me for some days now which I wanted to share in my post — loneliness versus aloneness.

Have you ever felt that utter loneliness when you are in a huge party? Have you ever got that sinking feeling when you are taking a walk in the evening? Have you ever felt futile after a grand success? Have you ever stood on a huge podium listening to a thunderous applause and yet expecting someone to appreciate you? Have you ever gone to the shopping complex with a bunch of relatives, yet found yourself lost and alone? Have you ever had a huge bunch of amazingly vibrant colleagues, teasing you and cheering you up and yet you are left desiring for a friend? Have you ever had a fantastic group of close-knit friends but still you desired to be just by yourself? Philosophical it might sound, and to some might look boring and brooding but I felt must share this experience.

D.H. Lawrence, the famous British novelist of early 20th century in the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, poignantly reflected that there is a difference between “loneliness” and “aloneness”. By “aloneness” Lawrence perhaps meant our very state of being — that state of mind which is an indivisible part of us. While, by “loneliness” he meant the acute sense of a need to be with oneself. One might choose to be lonely, but one cannot choose to be alone.

I remember once during my Postgraduation days in the Lawrence lecture series when we were taught Women in Love, my Professor had explained us this difference between “loneliness” and “aloneness” through the novels of Lawrence. He said that to be lonely is a matter of one’s choice. You can be lonely for as long as you want, but to be alone is beyond priorities and prerogatives.Aloneness is our very state — we are all essentially alone. I had not understood the implications of that statement then — perhaps was too naive to understand and perhaps had chosen my moments of being “lonely”. Those were the days when our lives and times were filled with people. But as time passes, the realization of that statement made some 7-8 years ago slowly dawns upon me. In most of the cases, loneliness can be tackled by the society, call it friends, colleagues or family. It is desired also. Else, the social bonding will be destroyed by the lonely mind and soul. In a quite different equation, the feeling of aloneness can not be handled by the society. Feeling of aloneness is sometimes desired because it gives personal space to some one to come out from a trauma, to reconcile from a personal problem. But, one has to keep an eye or there can be psychological problems leading to other social problems.

Recently, while reading through my old notebooks I came across that statement taken down from my Professor’s lectures with a red-mark, which meant that I have not understood the meaning of the particular note. I hunted the original quotations of Lawrence and what I read and discovered was something very new — very unfamiliar to what I had understood in PG days. Lawrence writes:

“It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.”

— D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover)

Thus, the people and the events that our lives are usually filled up with are but intermissions, a kind of “stop-gap” arrangement to fill our “aloneness”. They come and go and you have to reconcile with their coming and going and with your being “alone” after they come or after they go. I understood the implications of these lines after such a long forgotten phase. When I now read Lawrence after so many years, it seemed the words were his but the feelings were part of my old tattered lecture notes and the life — it is the life that I lead today. After every success, life makes you more keenly perceptive that you are alone.

In a place like IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), where practicality has more importance than anything else, aloneness or loneliness is very common. The value of time or money has more importance than sentimental excess and professionalism always outcasts the personal. In the personal front, people are very private, difficult to fathom. Some play computer games for hours, some keep walking by the lake side, some work and work, while some others watch movies relentlessly. These are the company that many choose and those who can not choose are left meandering through the alleys of darkness. Yet, I have realized that we are basically alone — after watching a movie what next? After submitting a journal paper what next? After playing 10 hours of computer games what next? This “what next” keeps haunting most of us. May be some of us accept it and may be some of us laugh at it as foolishness — yet there is no excuse.

These elemental differences of being “lonely” and being “alone” still do exist — you might name it sentimentalism, sensitivity or ground realities or life but most of us perceive it at some or the other point of our lives. While some of us can theorize it, some can philosophize it and some can define it — others just live it knowing not what to call it and how to brand it.

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